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The approximate order of frequency of the most commonly used letters in the English language, ETAOIN SHRDLU (pronounced eh-tay-oh-in shird-loo or eh-tay-oyn shird-lu) is best known as a nonsense phrase that sometimes appeared in print due to a quirk of Linotype machines, which dominated publishing for a century until being replaced by computers. The complete sequence is ETAOIN SHRDLU CMFGYP WBVKXJ QZ.
ETAOINSHRDLU were the first 12 letters on the Linotype keyboard, which was arrayed in order of frequency of usage. Linotype operators often generated the phrase by running their fingers down the line of keys, in order to complete a slug of type that contained a mistake. Occasionally this erroneous type would be included in the printed publication.
That happened often enough that the phrase is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary and also in the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
A documentary about the last issue of the New York Times to be composed in the hot-metal printing process (July 2, 1978) was entitled Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu.
Appearance in fiction and elsewhere
Occasionally, the phrase has been borrowed to mean something that is nonsense or absurd; Etaoin is recorded in a story by James Thurber from 1931, and the whole thing appeared in 1942 as the title of a short story by Fredric Brown about a sentient Linotype machine. In The Naughty Princess by Anthony Armstrong, written in 1945, there is a whimsical short story called "Etaoin and Shrdlu" which ends "And Sir Etaoin and Shrdlu married and lived so happily ever after that whenever you come across Etaoin's name even today it's generally followed by Shrdlu's". A once-famous play, The Adding Machine, also had Etaoin Shrdlu as a character. It was also the name of an irascible bookworm in Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo.
The phrase was used as the title for a piece by the band Cul-De-Sac on their 4th album Crashes To Its Light, Minutes To Its Fall, in 2000. The band also released a piece by the name of Etaoin Without Shrdlu on a live recording titled Immortality Lessons in 2002.
It was used in 1972 by Terry Winograd as the name for an early artificial-intelligence system in Lisp (see SHRDLU). In Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, there is a dialogue between fictional programmer "Eta Oin" and SHRDLU.
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